Modern Quilts With A Twist

Main menu

Tag Archives: paper piecing

Finished the smallest size (41″ x 35″) Lombard Street pattern and I’m about to send it to Studio Stitch, where I’ll be teaching the class. The triangles are all dots, though not polka dots!
I quilted this on my home machine, just following the zigzags in the background, and it worked just fine.
And the backing is a fun fabric I found on the sale rack at Studio Stitch last time I taught there! Win!

I’m teaching this as an introduction to modern paper piecing, of which it’s a great example. Paper piecing makes it easy to get all those nice sharp points, and the arrangement of blocks makes people wonder, “How did she DO that???” It’s always fun to keep people guessing 🙂

After making the Lombard Street quilt and sending it off to the shop where I’ll be teaching that pattern, I decided to make a little one. (The pattern includes three sizes.)

I cut the triangles from my 3-1/2 inch scraps, and had almost enough scraps to cut all 200 triangles–very little yardage was used up for this part of the process.

I decided on purple for the background and made a few test blocks. Looking at the test blocks, I particularly liked the triangle with the one big dot in the middle. I also decided these triangles would look better with a light grey background, so naturally I had to make another quilt to use that purple background fabric 😉

I love dotted fabric, so I looked through my stash,finding about 30 different fabrics with dots of some kind. I cut another 200 triangles and here are the sample blocks. Aren’t they cute? More later…

After over a year of dawdling, I have finished my quilt from the beautiful Lombard Street pattern by Sassafras Lane Designs.

“Amish on Lombard Street”, my quilt made from a Sassafras Lane pattern

I rarely use patterns, since I prefer to design my own quilts, but this one caught my eye! The “trick” is that it is paper pieced, which helps all those points come out nice and sharp. The pattern is well written and the instructions are clear. I had no trouble from that quarter.

I did have trouble when I decided to quilt it myself, and ended up taking out quilting from the entire quilt, then sending it off to my favorite longarm quilter! She did a great job, and I’m happy to say I had the perfect binding waiting when the quilt came back to me 🙂

And look at that nice angular quilt pattern that reinforces the overall design!

Here’s a picture of the original pattern, courtesy of the Sassafras Lane site:

I haven’t made any of the other patterns from Sassafras Lane, but I was very satisfied with this one, and they certainly have some cheerful and interesting designs. I do recommend checking them out if you like cute modern patterns.

Like this:

I’m very excited to be making a quilt for the Summer 2014 issue of Modern Quilts Unlimited. (Hint: If you go right over there and subscribe you’ll get not only the issue with my quilt, but the spring issue with a quilt by my friend Ann over at SewMessy.)

Beautiful Fabric from Michael Miller Fabrics

I’ll blog about that project when it’s published this summer, but for now I’ve made a confetti block from the scraps.

The Michael Miller Fabric Company (one of my favs) kindly supplied the fabric for this quilt from their Cotton Couture solids, plus a wonderful print called “Tara’s Fireworks“.

The quilt top is made, and I’m quilting it, BUT LOOK AT THIS:

Scraps! Lovely scraps!

All those beautiful colors in little bitty pieces just FORCED me to make an improvisational block representing confetti!

I just grabbed those scraps and started joining them any old way, putting in lots of white so the pieces of confetti would stand out. When the edges came out wonky, I trimmed. Usually I then sewed the trimmed section onto the next piece! Some of those bits were TINY:

The pin is for perspective on these tiny pieces

Eventually some bigger sections emerged.

And finally, I had a piece just a bit larger than 12-1/2 x 12-1/2, which I’ll eventually trim to make a block.

Confetti Block, 2014

I can just hear someone saying, “so what is this block FOR?” Well, it’s FOR FUN! OK, I do have a plan for this block, but that’s a secret for now 😉 Meanwhile, that was great fun, so if you haven’t tried improvisational piecing yet, just go for it!